The following biographical information has been compiled and written in collaboration with Neil Parsons, who has generously shared his research into The Rose of Rhodesia with the editors.

HAROLD MARVIN SHAW (Director). 1877-1926. After starting out as an actor in a San Francisco theatre in 1893, Shaw turned to the motion-picture business in 1909. As a member of the Edison Company’s stock of actors, he starred in several films by Edwin S. Porter. In 1911 he made his directorial debut in Edison’s New York studios, where he met his future wife Edna Flugrath. After briefly working for other companies, Shaw moved to England, where he directed over thirty films for the London Film Company. His most successful productions included The House of Temperley (1913) and Trilby (1914).[1] He also made a wartime recruitment film, sponsored by the British government, titled “You” (1916). In 1916, Shaw and Flugrath signed contracts with South African entertainment mogul I. W. Schlesinger and his African Film Productions. Their first project was De Voortrekkers (1916), a lavish historical epic intended to be the South African equivalent of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of A Nation (1915). Shaw completed at least two further films as an independent director in South Africa, The Rose of Rhodesia (1918) and Thoroughbreds All (1918). He made another eleven films in England after returning there in 1919. According to Rachael Low, Shaw’s work at this point “had deteriorated, his wife Edna Flugrath astonished and appalled the critics by taking unsuitable ingénue parts, and the work of the [London] company now seemed naive and out of date” (Low 1971, 123). Shaw returned to the US, making one film on a trans-Atlantic liner and three in Hollywood for Metro before retiring (Bushnell 1993, 308). Shaw died in a car accident Los Angeles on 30 January 1926 (The Los Angeles Times, 31 January 1926, 12). In 2000, the United States National Film Preservation Board added Shaw’s The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912) to its National Registry of landmark films. For a list of films directed by Shaw, see Appendix E.

EDNA MARIE FLUGRATH (Rose Randall). 1893-1966. Before becoming a screen actress, Brooklyn-born Flugrath had a number of stage roles and even worked as a ballet dancer with Anna Pavlova’s company and the Chicago Opera (Doyle 1993). She joined the Edison company in 1912 and appeared in numerous one- and two-reelers, many directed by her future husband Harold Shaw. Edison films for which both Shaw and Flugrath are credited include The Dam Builder (1912) and a Western titled At Bear Track Gulch (1912). Following Shaw to England in 1913, Flugrath became one of the leading ladies of the London Film Company. In England’s Menace(1914, dir. Harold Shaw), for example, her performance as Lady Betty attracted the praise of The Moving Picture World: “Miss Flugrath’s wonderfully clever enactment of her difficult part, … among other things, involves a flight on a motor cycle at top speed.” (The Moving Picture World, 12 September 1914, 1519). She left with Shaw for South Africa in 1916 and starred in both De Voortrekkers (1916) and The Rose of Rhodesia(1918). Shaw and Flugrath finally married in Johannesburg on 5 January 1917 (see Appendix C).[2]  After their return to England in 1919, she continued to act regularly in films by Shaw, including True Tilda (1920), The Land of Mystery (1920) (shot in Lithuania), and Kipps (1921). Moving to Hollywood in 1923, she joined her two younger sisters, Viola Dana and Shirley Mason, both of whom had become successful screen actresses. However, Flugrath never quite succeeded in establishing herself with the film studios, and reportedly opened a beauty parlour in Hollywood and, later in life, married an oil magnate named Halliburton Houghton (Lussier 1999).

CHIEF KENTANI (Chief Ushakapilla). Biographical information lacking. According to The Bioscope (25 September 1919, 21), Kentani was “ruler of a Fingo tribe” and “brother of the man who started the last Kaffir War” a reference to the Ninth Cape Frontier War (1877-8) in which the Fingo (Mfengu) were British allies ranged against amaXhosa fighting to regain their lands from white colonists and Mfengu chiefs. While he may have been Mfengu by ethnicity, the name Kentani (Centane) does not appear on lists of Mfengu chiefs. As the name of both a hill and a nearby colonial village in the Butterworth district of the Transkei, Kentani had prestige as the place where Mfengu soldiers, with British support, had held off Gcaleka and Nqaika Xhosa attackers in February 1878. Kentani, who was probably a headman rather than a chief, evidently associated himself with the place or the battle, but whether he came from there is an open question. The fact that The Rose of Rhodesia was filmed at the Bawa Falls in the Butterworth district would also suggest that Kentani and Yumi had a homestead in the vicinity or were on particularly good terms with the local headman.

PRINCE YUMI (Mofti). Biographical information lacking. According to The Bioscope, he was the son of Kentani (The Bioscope, 25 September 1919, 21). The spirited and sympathetic performance given by “Prince Yumi” in The Rose of Rhodesia suggests that he was an Mfengu labour migrant or student from the Ciskei or Transkei who caught the eye of the filmmakers in Cape Town. He then persuaded the filmmakers to follow him home to his father’s place near the Kei river.

MARMADUKE ARUNDEL WETHERELL (Jack Morel). 1884-1939. Yorkshire-born actor Marmaduke (‘Duke’) A. Wetherell had begun his overseas career as a frontier policeman in the Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana) before returning to England to become an actor in northern repertory theatres. After working for a couple of years in North-Western Rhodesia (now Zambia) as a pioneer farmer at Choma (Macmillan 2005, 365), he took to the stage again and joined Leonard Rayne’s touring company in South Africa in 1912. He was “loaned” to African Film Productions in 1916, appearing as a lead character in most of their films and assisting in the production of The Border Scourge in Swaziland over Christmas and New Year 1916-17. “Duke” had got on splendidly with the sage old Queen Mother of the Swazi, Labotsibeni (Stage and Cinema, 27 Jan. 1917, 78). He worked with Shaw on The Rose of Rhodesia (1918), both in front of the camera and probably in helping to write the script, and also acted in Shaw’s other South African film, Thoroughbreds All (1918). By 1920, Wetherell was teaching film-scenario writing at the Johannesburg Business College, after which he was accepted back into the AFP fold.  Later he played the part of David Livingstone in his own company’s production of Livingstone, filmed on location in Africa (Rapp & Weber 1989). He subsequently directed Robinson Crusoe(1927) in Trinidad as well as scenic and commercial documentary films in Britain and East Africa. His main claim to fame is as the “self-styled big-game hunter” who, with other jokers, constructed and floated the Loch Ness Monster whose photograph still adorns numerous publications and the title sequence of television’s History Channel.[3]  At his death Wetherell was working on a biopic about Paul Kruger, written by Gustav Preller (The Rand Daily Mail, 27 February 1939, 7).

HOWARD WYNDHAM (Bob Randall or Fred Winters). Son of the famous English theatre-owner Sir Charles Wyndham [Charles Culverwell] (1837–1919) by his first wife, Howard Wyndham had been a theatre manager in London before joining first African Film Productions and then Harold Shaw Film Productions Ltd in South Africa as assistant producer-director. Howard and his step-brother Bronson Albery eventually inherited ownership of two West End theatres, Wyndham’s and the New Theatre since renamed the Albery (“Wyndham”).

ERNEST G. PALMER (Cinematographer)[4] . 1885-1978. Palmer was a Kansas-born cinematographer who, like Harold Shaw, had migrated from Edison and IMP to London Films. His first British motion picture credit was for Ivanhoe (dir. Herbert Brenon, 1912). When London Films began to falter, Palmer moved on to aerial cinematography for the British War Department, using aeroplanes specially brought over from France (The Cape Times, 13 December 1917, 9). His credits as a cameraman-director included the 1250 feet documentary Fighting the German Air Raiders (1916). According to the Cape Times, much of his work was “done under the supervision of Mr. D. W. Griffith (of ‘The Birth of a Nation’ and ‘Intolerance’ fame) at the behest of the combined war offices of Britain, France and America” (The Cape Times, 13 December 1917, 9; “Ernest Palmer”). After returning to the US, Palmer worked on over a hundred and sixty films as a Hollywood cameraman between 1918 and 1960. He has been described as “not nearly as well known as his superb photography entitles him to be”. His films, mostly under contract to Fox, included “early sound musicals, science-fiction films, and under such demanding masters as F. W. Murnau” (Everson 1974). In 1942 he received an Academy Award for Best Cinematography on Blood and Sand (dir. Rouben Mamoulian).

HENRY HOWSE (Cinematographer). Howse had been in films “through his connection with the La Lumière brothers of France” dating back, by his own estimation, to 1894. England’s 1901 census places Henry C. Howse, aged 33 and born at Sharnford in Leicestershire, as a photographer and bookbinder at Roydon in Norfolk, but by 1911 he was based in Penge, Kent. Howse had joined the Salvation Army and was probably responsible for that organization’s prescient interest in cinematography in 1897—though he failed to energize the London headquarters into setting up a cinematographic department until 1903, and thus lost that initiative to the Salvation Army branch in Melbourne, Australia. Howse became the Salvation Army’s movie cameraman in 1903, making numerous films (up to six minutes each) around Britain and abroad—including General William Booth’s pilgrimage to Palestine and the visit of the Prince of Wales to India in 1905-06 (Hammond 2004).[5] Howse filmed Sir Thomas Lipton’s attempts in the America’s Cup sailing race and even accompanied a polar expedition in 1911-13 filming icebergs from the end of plank (Bottomore 2005).[6]  In addition, Howse claimed to have toured both Tibet and China before returning to England, where he founded his own production company, which is known to have made two movies: Meg of the Slums (1916) and The Stronger Will (1916). But, in 1917, I. W. Schlesinger induced Howse to come to South Africa, where he processed film stock as “one of the most competent dark-room and works managers” at the Killarney studios.[7]  He returned to Penge south of London but was dead within a few years.

Works Cited

Online databases such as www.imdb.com and www.citwf.com have also been consulted.
Bottomore, Stephen. 2005. Polar Expedition Films. Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel. Oxon; New York: Routledge, http://www.bookrags.com/tandf/polar-expedition-films-tf/ (accessed 30 June 2009).
Bushnell, Brooks, comp. 1993. Directors and Their Films: A Comprehensive Reference, 1895-1990. Jefferson and London: McFarland.
Doyle, Billy H. 1993. Edna Flugrath. Classic Images 215 (May): n.p.
Everson, William K. 1974. Berkeley Square (Fox, 1933). Directed by Frank Lloyd. New York: New School, WKE Notes Film Series 20: Program #1, 11 June, www.nyu.edu/projects/wke/notes/newschool/ns_740611.htm(accessed 27 February 2008).
Hammond, Margaret. 2004. Film Pioneer [Henry Howse]. The Salvationist (15 May): 10, www1.salvationarmy.org.uk (accessed 15 January 2009).
Hiley, Nicholas P. 1985. “The British Army Film”, “You”, and “For the Empire”: Reconstructed Propaganda Films, 1914-1916. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 5, no. 2: 165-182.
Low, Rachael. 1950. The History of the British Film 1914-1918. London: Allen & Unwin.
Low, Rachael. 1971. The History of the British Film 1918-1929. London: Allen & Unwin.
Lussier, Tim. The tragic Flugrath sisters: hard to believe but all three suffered the same loss,www.silentsaregolden.com/articles/flugratharticle.html (accessed 8 February 2008).
Macmillan, Hugh. 2005. An African Trading Empire: The Story of Susman Brothers and Wolfsohn, 1901-2005.
Rapp, Dean, and Charles W. Weber. 1989. British Film, Empire and Society in the Twenties: The “Livingstone” Film. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 9, no. 1: 3-17.
“Wyndham, Sir Charles.” Extract from Phyllis Hartnoll and Peter Found The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre (1996), http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O79-WyndhamSirCharles.html (accessed 3 July 2009).

Endnotes

[1] For biographical data of Shaw see also, “Harold Marvin Shaw: The Man and His Work,” The Bioscope, 24 February 1916, 759-61.
[2] According to an article in The Los Angeles Times, Shaw and Flugrath married “at the old Edison studios in New York” (The Los Angeles Times, 23 May 1923, Pt. 2, 1).
[3] John Darnton, “Loch Ness: truth is stranger than fiction,” New York Times, 20 March 1994, query.nytimes.com (accessed 12 November 2007); Stephen Lyons, “Birth of a Legend,”www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lochness/legend.html (accessed 12 November 2007) (written by the co-writer/ co-producer of WGBH/ NOVA documentary The Beast of Loch Ness).
[4] It is unclear how Palmer and Howse divided the work between themselves on Shaw’s Thoroughbreds All andThe Rose of Rhodesia. Howse is credited with having photographed the latter when it was shown in England (The Bioscope, 25 September 1919, 21). But the Cape Times (13 December 1917, 8) reported that Palmer had been engaged as (principal?) photographer for Harold Shaw Film Productions Ltd, while Howse was merely “general photographic expert” (a role which might correspond with his previous status as photographic “works-manager” in Johannesburg).
[5] Howse is thought to have “filmed many, if not all, of the early films of Booth featured in the God’s SoldierDVD” that was compiled from originals archived in the British Film Institute. Urbanora, “God’s Soldier,” The Bioscope Reporting on the World of Early and Silent Cinema, http://bioscope.wordpress.com/category/bioscope (accessed 10 August 2008).
[6] Howse stated himself that he accompanied Ernest Shackleton on the Nimrod Expedition in 1909. However he also stated that they had gone to the North Pole region, when in fact Shackleton at that point was attempting to reach the South Pole (Stage and Cinema, 24 February 1917, 2; see Appendix C).
[7] See also “Henry Howse,” The Cape Times, 13 December 1917, 8h; The Rand Daily Mail, 20 April 1918, n.p.

Created on: Tuesday, 18 August 2009